Graham Platner Wants to Be the Oyster Farmer Who Fixes the Senate

The origin story starts with a Norwegian salmon farm. A few AFL-CIO organizers watched a video of a guy from Sullivan, Maine fighting to keep industrial aquaculture out of his bay, looked him up, saw he’d donated to Bernie Sanders, drove to his house, and told him to run for United States Senate. He and his wife told them to get lost. They came back the next week. That is, without exaggeration, how Graham Platner ended up as the Democratic candidate polling 40 points ahead of a sitting two-term governor in Maine. Jon Stewart’s Weekly Show brought him on, and what followed was the rare political podcast episode that earns the word ‘conversation’ rather than begging you to let it use it.

Platner is 41, built like someone who runs a boat and occasionally yells at outboard engines. He did four combat tours, came back wrecked, bartended on Capitol Hill, got a close look at the people making the decisions that sent him overseas, and had what he describes with characteristic understatement as a reaction. He eventually retreated to the Maine coast, got into oyster farming, ran the local planning board, and started believing, slowly and against his own cynicism, that regular people might actually be good. That the problem wasn’t America. It was a political system ‘that elevates a lot of abnormal people.’ When Stewart laughed at that line, you got the sense he’d been waiting years for someone to just say it plainly.

The FDR Guy

If there’s a version of this episode that loses the thread, it’s the one where Platner’s New Deal references feel like debate prep. They don’t. He drops Franklin Roosevelt the way a carpenter quotes load-bearing math: because the structure actually needs it. He knows the Economic Bill of Rights. He knows the court-packing threat. He knows that FDR wrote in 1928 that the Democratic Party had no constructive vision and was basically waiting for Republicans to blow it up so they could inherit the rubble. Stewart’s response to that last one was immediate.

And at that time was Chuck Schumer the leader of the Senate? I’m just curious.

The historical riffing earns its place because Platner keeps yanking it back to the material. The New Deal wasn’t ‘picking around the edges,’ he says. Social Security wasn’t a tax credit or a block grant. It was invented out of whole cloth by Frances Perkins and a bunch of labor unions. The comparison to what the modern Democratic Party calls ambition is, once you hear it laid out, fairly devastating. Stewart has been making this argument in various forms for twenty years. Platner makes it like someone who lived inside the policy failure rather than observed it from a television studio.

The Democratic Party has never been able to articulate what it’s trying to do, like what’s the end goal, never really articulates a clear set of policies that to get us there, and then never never seems to want to wield power to make those policies a reality.

Why the Alt-Right Didn’t Get Him

Stewart asks the question directly and it’s the best moment in the episode. Angry young white vet, fourth deployment, isolated, bitter, spending time on the internet. That is a recruitment poster for the movement that did capture a lot of guys who look exactly like Platner. Stewart doesn’t dance around it: ‘you are fertile soil, brother.’ Platner’s answer is honest in a way that most politicians would never risk. He got the Marine Corps version of the whole package, the brotherhood and the aggression and the sense of purpose, and it still left him empty. He didn’t need the internet to sell him a lesser version of something he’d already maxed out and found wanting.

The thing that actually ended up filling all the emptiness inside of me, it wasn’t rage. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t any of that stuff. It was literally like just spending time with other people in the place that I live and like and working with people on projects to improve all of our lives.

The Democratic Party, per Platner, is still trying to find the magic words that will make voters feel cared about without the party actually having to care about them. He is not subtle about this. ‘I don’t think they actually do want to tax the rich,’ he says, because taxing the rich would ‘really piss off their donors.’ He also, almost as a side note, mentions that Palantir and Blackstone just dropped two million dollars in negative ads against him. When Stewart asks why Palantir has it out for an oyster farmer, Platner explains that he supports breaking up companies that steal everyone’s data. So. There’s that.

People are smart. They don’t like when they’re being li they don’t like the magic words. They want you to say things like, ‘No, we want you to have healthcare. That’s why we have this universal health care policy.’

Stewart closes by comparing Platner to a combination of historian Heather Cox Richardson and the Gorton’s fisherman. It’s a ridiculous image that is also somehow accurate. Nobody from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has ever called him. He is pulling ahead of Susan Collins in early polling. These two facts are, for the party, related. Stewart sees it. Platner sees it. The DSCC is apparently very busy.